Designed by Howard Aiken and IBM, the Mark I was built at IBM, then shipped to Harvard University. It was presented to the university on August 7 1944. In May 1944, the US Navy Bureau of Ships started using it for computing and it was very reliable. The Mark I had 60 sets of 24 switches for manual data entry and could store 72 numbers, each up to 23 decimal digits long. It read instructions using punched paper tape. IBM originally named this machine ASCC, but Harvard and Aiken renamed it the Mark I.
